Monastery

It was with a heavy heart that a Cistercian monk who headed a monastery in a heavily populated South Jersey town prepared last July for a trip to the Casamari Abbey. Up for debate in a cloistered hall just south of Rome was the future of his spiritual community, established 54 years ago on about 120 acres of farmland off a bumpy dirt road in Mount Laurel. The Rev. Lino S. Parente was concerned because he and another monk at Our Lady of Fatima monastery had retired from their longtime jobs of managing and preaching at the adjacent St. John Neumann Roman Catholic Church, leaving only two other monks fully employed at the monastery, recalled James Cattanea, a longtime church deacon and close friend of Parente's.

Father Makarios, a Greek Orthodox monk from the ancient monastery on Mount Sinai in the Sinai Peninsula, visits the Church of the Annunciation in Elkins Park recently. Father Makarios has been touring Greek Orthodox parishes in the United States with a lecture and slide show of life at the monastery, which dates to the Byzantine Empire, 395-1453 A.D.

The Monastery is full of life. A golden retriever sits on the stairway, a parrot squawks noisily upstairs, and two cats cast their eternally bored gaze at visitors. John and Jackie Vernon and Ed and Lisa Johanningsmeier live in . . . well, heaven . . . deep in the Wissahickon Valley near Kitchens Lane. It's quiet, woodsy and private. It could be the middle of Chester County or upper Bucks County, but it's West Mount Airy. The house is called the Monastery. Some maps refer to the location as the "Monastery and Baptisterion.

There are images in Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?, a mesmerizingly beautiful Zen meditation from Korea's Bae Yong-kyun, that you simply don't want to see end: the shot of a huge cherry tree, its blossom- laden branches casting dapples of light over the ground where a monk stands, motionless; the shot of a mountain forest, the mist tracing across twisted pines as a fast stream courses down the rocks; the shot of a river pool reflecting sky...

The Monastery is full of life. A golden retriever sits on the stairway, a parrot squawks noisily upstairs, and two cats cast their eternally bored gaze at visitors. John and Jackie Vernon and Ed and Lisa Johanningsmeier live in . . . well, heaven . . . deep in the Wissahickon Valley near Kitchens Lane. It's quiet, woodsy and private. It could be the middle of Chester County or upper Bucks County, but it's West Mount Airy. The house is called the Monastery. Some maps refer to the location as the "Monastery and Baptisterion.

Getting to Tassajara is more than a matter of going from the four-lane highway near Monterey to the two-lane blacktop through the Carmel Valley and, finally, to the dusty track that switches back and forth as it climbs toward an isolated valley in the Santa Lucia Mountains. Getting to Tassajara is going to another world. A world where "peace comes dropping slow," as William Butler Yeats said of the Isle of Innisfree. A world that "roared with silence," in the words of Buddhist historian Rick Fields.

July 3, 1989 | By Kathy Brennan, Daily News Staff Writer The Associated Press also contributed to this report

Donna Ercolano had no desire to return to the world of distraction, violence and sin after spending 14 of her 38 years in the seclusion of a Carmelite monastery. But the nun ended a self-imposed, nine-month isolation over the weekend by fleeing with two other nuns from the North Jersey monastery for an undisclosed location. A fourth nun, Sister Teresita, chose to remain to continue the group's protest. Ercolano's mother said last night that her daughter still wanted to lead a secluded, pious life.

The trio of rebel nuns who fled their North Jersey monastery under orders from the Vatican after nearly nine months in seclusion are together in a home at an undisclosed location, the father of one of the three women said yesterday. In a brief telephone interview from his Castleton, N.Y., home, Dominic Ercolano said his daughter, Sister Maria of the Holy Face of Jesus, was with the two other nuns. "They're not giving up," said Anne Ercolano, Sister Maria's mother. ". . . They plan on keeping their appeal going as long as it takes to set things straight.

The St. Thomas Monastery has hardly been a secret on the campus of Villanova University, but the friars there hope that the new face it is showing to campus will make the place more visible, literally and figuratively. The 57 friars of the Order of St. Augustine, whose predecessors founded Villanova in 1842, have just moved back to their renovated home at the center of the Main Line campus. The $12.5 million project is meant to reinforce the friars' sense of community, both with each other and with the university they continue to serve.

Floor-length white robes tied with dangling leather belts are not the usual dress for witnesses appearing before the Lower Merion Zoning Hearing Board. But then, it's not every day that someone applies for permission to open a monastery. Dressed in the white hooded habit of the 779-year-old Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mercy, the Rev. Steven Rosczewski told the board last week that he and a group of his fellow friars had agreed to buy a nine-bedroom stone house on Blancoyd Road facing City Avenue.

It was with a heavy heart that a Cistercian monk who headed a monastery in a heavily populated South Jersey town prepared last July for a trip to the Casamari Abbey. Up for debate in a cloistered hall just south of Rome was the future of his spiritual community, established 54 years ago on about 120 acres of farmland off a bumpy dirt road in Mount Laurel. The Rev. Lino S. Parente was concerned because he and another monk at Our Lady of Fatima monastery had retired from their longtime jobs of managing and preaching at the adjacent St. John Neumann Roman Catholic Church, leaving only two other monks fully employed at the monastery, recalled James Cattanea, a longtime church deacon and close friend of Parente's.

GOD ALMIGHTY - an American-made Trappist beer? That's the news that stunned beer drinkers last month, as St. Joseph's Abbey, about an hour west of Boston, revealed that its Spencer Trappist Ale had been certified as the first Trappist beer brewed outside of Europe. The monastic brewery will carry on the ancient Benedictine principal that monks should "live by the work of their hands. " It all seems so quaint and holy, especially considering the near-sacred regard for other Trappist beers, including Chimay and Orval . We've come a long way since the days when a community of beer-making Catholic monks in western Pennsylvania were a national scandal.

The bells tolled solemnly as congregants sang "Hail, Holy Queen," and priests, nuns, and Bishop Dennis Sullivan filed out of the stone chapel for the last time. After 113 years, the Monastery of the Dominican Nuns of the Perpetual Rosary offered its final public Mass on Monday. Its four remaining cloistered sisters will move to a convent in Elmira, N.Y., in coming weeks, leaving behind, parishioners say, a powerhouse of prayer, countless memories, and quite a few miracles. "The monastery here in Camden became the center of the Perpetual Rosary movement in America," Sullivan said at the altar, flanked by 18 priests.

Kneeling in pews behind a grate separating them from the chapel, four nuns bowed in prayer as the chaplain delivered his homily. "It will be tough to leave this place they've been so many years, but the faith they've built is a rock," Father Anthony Ignatious Cataudo said at the altar. "It cannot be moved. " The four women, dressed in white tunics and black veils, have spent decades praying to God, cloistered in the Monastery of the Dominican Nuns of the Perpetual Rosary, an immense stone temple that has stood in Camden for 113 years.

PETRA, Jordan - We knew the night would be a little different than expected when at check-in Mahmoud cheerfully informed us, "I've upgraded you to a cave. " That was our introduction to staying at a Bedouin camp in Jordan. We had visions of dusty tents with Persian rugs underfoot and the odd camel lumbering by. This was true enough, but we were directed to our cave, a hole in the wall (literally) that barely had room for a floor mat, with enough striped pillows to fill a Martha Stewart home furnishings catalog.

THE ARCHDIOCESE of Philadelphia let a priest who admitted abusing boys in Northeast Philadelphia return to a limited ministry in 1997 with a warning to stay "low key" and away from churches where he might be seen by his victims or other accusers. A year after confessing the abuse to a counselor at a treatment center in Canada, the Rev. Stanley J. Gana was named chaplain of a Carmelite nuns' monastery in Philadelphia. When he asked to expand his ministry to assist at other parishes, Monsignor William J. Lynn agreed - with conditions.

COMING TO America in 2012: The World's Greatest Beer. It's Westvleteren 12 , a Belgian rarity brewed at the tiny St. Sixtus Trappist monastery by a brotherhood of notoriously secretive monks. Packaged in a plain brown bottle with no label, Westvleteren 12 has consistently ranked as either the No. 1 or No. 2 brand over the past decade at RateBeer.com and BeerAdvocate.com. Along with its less potent (but equally delicious) sisters, Westvleteren Blonde and Westvleteren 8 , it is typically sold only at the monastery and only under a bizarre set of rules designed to protect the monks' privacy.

An emblematic, 100-year-old property that once was home to an order of cloistered nuns is being demolished on Girard Avenue in North Philadelphia. The demolition, which began Tuesday, surprised some neighbors, who prized the long-empty buildings as both windows into the city's past and as specimens of Romanesque and Victorian architecture. "To destroy something like that in my view is an act of vandalism," said David S. Traub, whose architectural offices are near the former Monastery of St. Clare, built in 1911, and whose group, Save Our Sites, works to preserve the city's historic buildings.

An emblematic, 100-year-old property that once was home to an order of cloistered nuns is being demolished on Girard Avenue in North Philadelphia. The demolition, which began Tuesday, surprised some neighbors, who prized the long-empty buildings as both windows into the city's past and as specimens of Romanesque and Victorian architecture. "To destroy something like that in my view is an act of vandalism," said David S. Traub, whose architectural offices are near the former Monastery of St. Clare, built in 1911, and whose group, Save Our Sites, works to preserve the city's historic buildings.

Msgr. Sharbel Lischaa, 78, pastor emeritus of St. Maron's Church in South Philadelphia, who ministered to the Lebanese American community and to the merchants in the Italian Market, died of kidney disease Tuesday, Aug. 2, at St. Maron's Rectory. A native of Lebanon, Msgr. Lischaa came to the United States in 1973 to visit an aunt. The next year, he became pastor of St. Maron's, a Maronite Rite Catholic church on Ellsworth Street. Maronite Catholics, who originated in Lebanon, are under the authority of the pope but have their own liturgy.